This review of Science Through Stories by @thepndmonster was posted on her blog on the 12th October. A link to her brilliant blog is provided at the foot of the page. Many thanks for reviewing this title! We massively enjoy hearing about how the Storytelling Schools model works with home education.
Science Through Stories: Teaching Primary Science with Storytelling by Chris Smith and Jules Pottle
Our friends at Hawthorn Press sent us this exciting new publication following our expression of interest. I was particularly interested in this book as it focuses on teaching science through storytelling and, as our Waldorf early years curriculum is all about storytelling, I am hopeful the two will compliment each other.
The book is aimed at primary school teachers who are teaching in classrooms, delivering the stories in this book to children of primary school age. As you know, we are home educating and we don’t do any actual ‘teaching’ which makes it very interesting finding out how well the Storytelling Schools publications translate in our circumstances. Bundle Number one is 4.5 years old so is at the youngest end of the spectrum for this book.
We looked a story from the Physics section; this is a story I am already familiar with so I was very interested to see how it translates, it is also seasonal so fits with our seasonal approach to home education.
Physics was something I was hopeless at in school. I never really ‘got it’ and even now, years later, it still brings to mind the mundane and overwhelming. I put this down to the teaching. It wasn’t made real or interesting and always appeared so daunting. These days I know better, anything can be made fun and spark that interest if it is presented in the right way, so let’s see if I’m proved right …
Firstly I had a good read through of the story, the ‘tips for telling’, the suggested ‘Ways to work with the story’ and the related science activities included for us to try. These are also followed by a section providing ideas to ‘Explore other curriculum ideas that link to the story’ this includes Reading, Fiction, Non Fiction, Art and Design/Technology.
After reading everything through, I was very excited to begin!
Bundle Number One and I sat down for the story, him being completely unaware that this was anything more than just that, and I told the story with him thoroughly enjoying joining in on the chorus of:
‘Heave-ho, heave-ho! Pull the turnip free.
Heave-ho, heave-ho! We’ll have it for our tea.’
… as we pretended to pull our giant turnip out of the ground. We also got Bundle Number One’s favourite toys involved to help us pull, which he loved!
After the story, we moved on to explore a selection of related activities. These activities were taken from the book and I chose:
Moving cars
We played with Bundle Number One’s transport toys, pushing and pulling them along the carpet, adding bean bag ‘road humps’ to see what difference they made.
Shaping dough
we pushed, pulled, twisted, squashed, stretched and rolled some play dough …
During each of these activities, we were playing around with Forces – Pulling and Pushing. The fact that all of the learning took place through first hand experience, none of it feeling like a ‘lesson’ of any sort really worked with our own approach to home education and I would most definitely recommend this book to fellow home educators, you can grab your copy here!
Watch This space for more updates as we discover Science Through Stories!
Buy the book here…
More about Storytelling Schools here…
Read this post on the original blog here…
